In middle life each man wrote a long elegiac work centering on the death of someone very near his heart: Tennyson's In Memoriam su...rely corresponds to Brahms' German Requiem.... At the other extreme you will no doubt think of Brahms' fiery Hungarian dances and graceful Viennese waltzes: in the work of Tennyson there are similar pieces, in broad dialect with touches of rough comedy and unbuttoned jollity, in particular "The Northern Farmer." Between these extremes, in the work of each man, lies a single masterpiece, strange but characteristic. Tennyson's Maud is what he calls a monodrama, a set of lyrics spoken by one man, telling the story of tragic love. In 1869 Brahms lost the beautiful Julie Schumann: the result was his famous Alto Rhapsody, an extended lyric, in fact a monodrama on the agonies of loneliness in a heart thirsty for love. The nineteenth century was a nationalist era, so both Brahms and Tennyson wrote pieces we should now call jingoistic: they are seldom played or read today, but they are part of the total picture. For Brahms the best known was his Triumph Song, written after the German conquests of France. For Tennyson, it was "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and other galloping and shouting lyrics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It's usually pointed out that women are not fit for political power, and ought not to be trusted with a vote because they are poli...tically ignorant, socially prejudiced, narrow-minded, and selfish. True enough, but precisely the same is true of men!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »